A delightful put down of the bourgeois, nouveau riche culture around The New York Times Magazine, what is being called there the “Urban Modern”. Leon Wieseltier in The Washington Diarist – Against the Plane:
“…what is being celebrated here is the ideology of no ideology–the ascendancy of the Nora Ephron view of the world, which may be succinctly described as “food and drink and bathroom fixtures.” What moves such a heart most (aside from children, the poor, and the homeless) are amenities and trivialities. The conferring of importance upon the unimportant, and of unimportance upon the important: this is a mark of decadence, the cognitive inversion of people who live “mostly in aesthetic terms” because they have secured themselves materially–or so they would like to believe—against philosophy and pain. They live for lightness and distraction. Their laughter is the sound of luck. They acquit themselves of their intellectual obligations with opinions. The anxiety that arguing may be bad manners is plausibly held by someone whose primary arena of political action may be the dinner party.”
(via bill wasik)
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